Introduction to
Love Notes: Making Relationships Work
for Young Adults and Young Parents

Love Notes aims to help young people make wise relationship and sexual choices—choices that will help them, rather than create barriers, for achieving their education, employment, relationship and family goals. It is designed especially for young people who are at risk for early and unplanned pregnancy, who are pregnant or already parenting, or who are involved with a partner who is a parent. Even so, much of the content of Love Notes would be relevant to any young person. A fundamental premise of this program is that one’s love life is not neutral. The decisions one makes in romantic attachments can affect every other aspect of life—school and work success, physical and mental health, and especially one’s child. If we want to help young people succeed, attention to education, employment, and parenting, as well as to healthy relationships and marriage, is needed. Troubled and unstable relationships and unplanned pregnancies have a way of derailing the progress young people may otherwise make in school, work or parenting.

Having a child when young and single is often an early step in a cycle of unstable and troubled serial relationships. A young unmarried mother who has a second child too soon with a second poor relationship choice has just increased the challenges she and her child will face. A young man, barely or not even into the labor market yet, but who has support payments to one “baby mama” and then another “baby mama,” will add more layers of difficulties to his life. Unplanned pregnancies clearly carry risks for teens and twenty-somethings alike. These young parents are less likely to be in a committed relationship, less likely to move into a more formal union such as marriage, and are more likely to have high levels of relationship conflict and unhappiness.[1] This increased likelihood of “relationship turbulence” poses significant risks to the well-being of their children.[2] An important underlying factor is that young people are generally unaware of how their love life can play a crucial role, for good or ill, in achieving their educational, employment, and personal goals, and in the well being of their children, now or in the future.

Love Notes builds assets and protective factors in unique ways. It appeals to young people’s aspirations, rather than merely emphasizing what they must avoid. It offers young people engaging ways to learn more about themselves, to cultivate a vision of what they want for their future, to establish goals, and to take steps. Participants gain not only knowledge, but also real skills for knowing what a healthy relationship is and isn’t, for choosing partners wisely, and for developing and maintaining healthy relationships. They are provided rich frameworks to help them assess their current or past relationships. They are encouraged to leave dangerous relationships safely. They are helped to identify what might need to change or improve for a relationship to continue and deepen. Participants learn how to go about their next relationship more wisely and cautiously. Importantly, youth acquire a powerful set of research-based skills for improving communication and their ability to handle conflict, adapted from the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program – University of Denver. These skills are critical for all relationships, and for co-parenting.

Love Notes offers a complementary and fresh approach to interpersonal violence prevention (IPV). Many young people are short on models of healthy relationships and are shorter yet on the skills for developing them. Teaching about healthy relationships provides a positive and proactive way to address IPV by equipping young people with the insights and skills to move towards what they want and not just away from what’s harmful. In addition, Love Notes contains powerful activities to not only raise awareness of abuse and early warning signs but also to practice setting boundaries and applying them at the first sign of disrespect.

A unique approach to pregnancy prevention is found in this program. Sexual decision-making is embedded within a rich exploration of intimacy and the development of healthy relationships. It broadens the definition of "safe sex." It examines some of the larger consequences. Indeed, young people—teens and twenty-somethings alike—might be more motivated to avoid pregnancy if they were encouraged to step outside themselves and look more deeply at the consequences for children. By placing the child at center stage in the activities, participants see the consequences of sliding into unplanned pregnancy (a first or subsequent), and the “relationship turbulence” that often accompanies it, through the eyes of a child.

Examining how an unplanned pregnancy can disadvantage or hurt a child may tap a more powerful source of motivation to more consciously plan to prevent a first or subsequent pregnancy. It helps bring home to young people why it really matters to avoid pregnancy and to wait to have a child (or a 2nd child). In the activities and applications young people are asked to consider their sexual values, to define their boundaries and/or desired pacing, and to develop clear plans to prevent pregnancy and STDs.

Helping young men and young women to choose partners more wisely, to acquire skills and insights for developing and maintaining healthy relationships and marriages, and to be deliberate by planning for the sexual decisions they make, can reduce some formidable barriers in their personal lives as they work toward their goals in education, employment and parenting.

This program aims to help participants understand not only what healthy relationships and marriages may mean for themselves, but what they mean for children as well. Indeed, the ultimate goal of this program is not only to affect the lives of the young parents and young adults participating, but also to impact their children or future children. But, to help children we must help their parents. Today we know that children are affected for better or worse by the quality and stability of the couple relationship. Happily, we have some research-based tools to offer young people as they navigate their way through their intimate lives to improve their odds for healthy relationships and marriages.

Love Notes is packed with lively activities that use real relationship scenarios written by diverse teens and young adults. It incorporates music, film, stories, drawing, and sculpting. It appeals to males as well as females. It includes an engaging interactive workbook to apply all of the concepts to their own lives. Finally, there is a Trusted Adult Connection activity for each lesson to build connection and communication with a caring adult or mentor on these very important issues.

Love Notes draws on content from two other curricula authored and co-authored respectively by this author. They are Relationships Smarts Plus, a teen relationship curriculum in the Love U2 series, and Within MY Reach for adults. Relationship Smarts Plus is in the fourth year of a five-year evaluation involving over 5,000 diverse teenagers in the state of Alabama. Researchers from Auburn University conducting the study report sustained gains over time. Preliminary findings include increases in students’ realistic understanding of relationships and decreases in faulty relationship beliefs, broadened understandings of relationship aggression, and declines in verbal aggression in relationships as compared to those in control groups.[3]

Within MY Reach, co-authored with Scott Stanley and Galena Kline-Rhoades, is a decision-making and relationship skill program for adults who struggle with disadvantage and who are at risk for poor quality relationships and relationship instability.[4] Within MY Reach contains the research-based communication and conflict management skills of the nationally-acclaimed Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program that have been shown to reduce divorce and incidences of physical aggression, while increasing relationship satisfaction and communication.[2]

The relationship skills embedded in this curriculum link with an optional supplemental parenting module that builds a critical knowledge base through lively activities, visuals, stories, and media about early child development—that is, about the pre-natal period, attachment and emotional attunement, early brain development, and effective parenting skills. It is geared to helping young people make the link between early experiences and later child outcomes while reinforcing how healthy couple relationships can nurture those outcomes. Child rearing in those first few years lay down the foundation for school and social success. Parents are the first and most important teachers. These lessons provide information and practice that parents need to build the cognitive and non-cognitive skills that are essential for their child’s school and social success.

[1]Science Says Brief #34 "Unplanned Pregnancy and Family Turmoil (April 2008). Available from the
National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

[2] Ibid

[3] For more information on the Relationship Smarts Plus study contact Dr. Jennifer Kerpelman at
Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama.

[4] For more information on Within MY Reach, including research, see www.withinmyreach.com